Electrico W

PROLOGUE OF SORTS

We were heading toward Rossio in a taxi the color of olives, green and black, an ancient Mercedes 220, one of those rounded sedans from the sixties. It was still summer but a gray Atlantic rain was falling and the sky was pewter-colored. Lisbon did not look itself, but the setting may not matter very much. Water streamed over the car window, Antonio gazed out at the city, not concentrating on anything for long. I thought he seemed transparent, absent and present all at the same time — a watermark in the weft of a sheet of paper.

As the taxi slowed to turn into the square by Eduardo VII Park, Antonio took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and struck a match. He inhaled, sucking in his cheeks, and wound down the window to blow out a scroll of smoke snatched away as we sped along. I mention these insignificant details, not much more than snapshots, because they struck me so emphatically, as did the suffocating smell of sulfur and tobacco.

It felt as if time had taken a step to one side, a divergence as fine as a crack in the glaze on porcelain. Something unfamiliar had insinuated itself inside me. I can think of no other way of putting it: I no longer saw a thirty-year-old man in flesh and blood sitting beside me on that seat with its cracked leather, but a character, a character from a book.

That same evening I made the decision to write it. I didn’t let my ignorance of the plot or framework hold me back. I had no Ariadne’s thread, I just took my big black notebook from my bag and wrote these few sentences, in the past tense, exactly as they appear here, I have left them unchanged.

People will suspect some sort of imposture, a feeble writer’s strategy. They would be wrong: there was actually nothing extraordinary, fascinating, or, in a nutshell, bookworthy about Antonio Flores. Physically he was ordinary, although his brown, almost curly hair tended toward auburn. His dark eyes were mischievous without being playful, and cutting down his forehead between his thick eyebrows he had two vertical lines that gave him an alert expression. His legs looked too short to me, and he seemed more elegant sitting than standing. If he had to walk quickly, a childhood injury made him limp. And yet he had indisputable charm, his own particular way of occupying space, what people call magnetism.

There was nothing predictable or expected about Antonio Flores. Never, in the nine days I spent with him, was I so much as a comma ahead of the sentences that his presence provoked. Never, right up until the collapse, did I guess where Antonio was taking me. He himself knew nothing about this extraordinary phenomenon. His every move conformed to some invisible scheme, and certain silences dictated the beginning of a new paragraph.

So here begins the book. I have revised it — very little, to be honest — as I typed it up. I altered some turns of phrase because they no longer conveyed the exact feeling of the moment in which they were conceived. It was 1985, nearly twenty-seven years ago. At the time I didn’t feel like showing it to publishers. I did give it a title, though, and this morning, with the sun taking its time coming up, it is still called Eléctrico W, the name of a tramline in Lisbon. But that has been a provisional title for so long.

This paragraph is added in because, according to the computer, the manuscript comprised 53,278 words. I wanted it to be a prime number. Out of some superstition. So I added an adjective here, an adverb there, I don’t even remember where. And this is where the notebook starts again.